Aibu for being increasingly worried about the job market?

[gymboe]

another threat of redundancy here. Business not going well and to be honest we are full steam ahead with AI.

a quick search in my large town in south of England:

• 5 x nhs jobs (4 of which I am not qualified for and one is really terrible pay as just three days per week)
• school jobs: just three and very low pay
• our high street is mostly made of charity shops and vape stores. Retail doesn’t offer what I want.
• a big employer now hardly owns any office space. There are just a few jobs. I’m not qualified.

I do have a degree but found myself in a specialised account/client mgmt type role. Pays around £50k.

10 years ago there were loads of these type of jobs, decent salary even if you had to start low, good career progression, hundreds of them and tonnes of temp agencies. And the nhs had loads of admin jobs. Not to mention school jobs being plentiful.

where the hell have they all gone?

this is a huge issue. Massive. I’m really worried.

My job is safe, in fact it's a bit more in demand - monitoring and assuring data, including data produced by AI. It's my job to be a watchman for this sort of thing.

Good for you

I’m really sorry to hear that

Universal credit isn’t far off a universal basic income. It has restrictions of course, but it’s in place to be easily pivoted for all

I agree and the firms I instruct are also reducing training contract numbers. Paralegal work has become a fairly normal route to qualification, so without it (and with fewer training contracts) I have no idea what work legal graduates will be doing in 5 years. The number of LLB’s being churned out of universities shows no sign of abating and it’s been obvious for years that, even without AI, we have too many graduates trying to get into law relative to the number of available jobs.

Truthfully, good legal AI is better at drafting and legal research than a trainee or NQ solicitor ime. But the more “grown up” bits of the job - strategy, negotiation, commerciality - are learned while also doing the grunt work at junior level, and that won’t happen for much longer. Many paralegals are currently training the AI that will ultimately replace them.

Hoping DS becomes a plumber or an electrician.

Interesting thread, as I'm in my late 50s and while "sate dependent" at the moment, was hoping to look at getting work in the New Year, despite being a veritable dinosaur in most skill areas. I had an independent retail business for 7 yeaes, the last two as a sole trader because DP died suddenly, and I am wary of discussing the myriad reasons for its failure as I had my arse roundly handed to me on the thread about badly run "hobby" shops, and apoarebtly I have to rake responsibility because it was all my own fault.

But no matter, I'm very interested in the perspectives shown here, because I keep being told I'm just being unecessarily pessimistic about my future prospects and it's all in my head. Good to know I'm not just imagining the signs that I have potentially become obsolete......

In recent years we have seen our country’s leaders (all parties, this is not a party-political comment) instigate policies that amount to ‘The Dummies Guide to destroying a prosperous economy and safe civil society in several easy steps.’

Years ago now (2006 -2010 ish) I was a HR manager for a major supermarket and I was based in one of the big superstores. We had 4 HR staff, 4 payroll, a store manager, 5 team managers, team leaders, vast numbers of till and store staff, a cafe, a staff canteen employing 3, a proper fully staffed bakery and pizza counter -hundreds of people. Now the same store has no HR or payroll (all online) no cafe, no canteen (vending machines instead) limited counters, three actual tills left that are often unmanned (all now big banks of self scan) and extremely scaled down management. I still have a few friends there and it's unrecognisable from the place it was in the 2000s. It must have I would say a quarter of the staff we had back then. We were always hiring.

You missed the 'while getting themselves and their friends as rich as possible' part!

I have a background in university administration and a lot of institutions seem to be making people redundant.
At ours they are trying to automate as much as they can, but I reckon in about 5 years they will have got rid of loads more of us and will only keep a few on as backup in case something goes wrong.

My most recent job was a call-centre role which I left of my own accord as the hours didn’t suit childcare.

The company are very big on supporting local people, providing jobs, offering promotion opportunities to those who join in the call centre and stay loyal to the business etc. They have always prided themselves on this. But even so, just before I left AI was starting to creep in. We got an “AI buddy” that would be trained on the sort of calls we get from customers and would generate a script for us to follow, and if you were found to have not followed the script you were reprimanded. We previously all had a printed out script and these were taken off us and binned as they wanted us to use the “AI buddy”. The recent monthly newsletter also said how excited they were about AI developments in the business.

They still hire new people each month as there’s a high turnover with it being a call centre, but I think they are just biding their time. I don’t think the AI is quite there yet to take over the job but it will be in a year or two I’m sure.

Those joining the call-centre were assured that after doing calls for 2 years they’d be able to be promoted to an auditor - listening in and marking calls that new staff take to ensure that they were following all the rules, policies etc correctly. That role has now been taken over by AI as it can listen to the call and generate the report, and send feedback to staff without any human involvement. They used to pay staff £33,000 yearly to do that.

My DP works a job in a port, driving containers from one part of the port to another to be put onto a ship. They are trying to get a self-driving vehicle to do this. My partner says some countries already have full automated ports.

It is terrifying. My partner is going to train to become a drainage engineer as he thinks this job will be in demand in the coming years due to the crumbling Victorian pipes we have in this country. I will be looking to get into childcare or SEN provision in schools (like a teaching assistant) as I think that is relatively safe from AI for now and the need for SEN provision is rising due to more children being diagnosed. During the time I am at home with my baby I’m going to do an onlineTA qualification when baby naps and hope for the best

it’s important to keep an eye on the news and you’ll be able to foresee what jobs will be needed in the coming years.

True. It’s so upsetting. Particularly because they were custodians of a previous inheritance: one of the most prosperous, clean, safe countries with one of the most dynamic job markets, while also having sensible but not detrimental safeguards in place. In essence we had a great balance and anyone who wanted to work hard and make something of themselves wanted to come to Britain. Now those same people are all leaving and the next generation of entrepreneurs don’t want to come here. We are literally destroying pur tax base.

They're not actually. Real features, written by real people are being used-often without their permission-to teach AI how to write them.

ALCS are on to it but there really is little, in the long run, that they will be able to do about it.

Also, Waterstones have said they will stock AI books.

I was shouted down on another forum when I tried to warn people that if they insisted on working from home then their job could be done from anywhere in the world and employers would choose the cheapest.

Now we have AI as well, with people being laid off by the hundreds (400 by TikTok UK right now, all their moderators).

AI is stupendously powerful already and now AI is developing AI it's going exponential in what it can do.

We are in for an utter shitshow until companies and governments wake up to the fact that they need consumers and people can only consume if they are given money not to do paid work.

There could be quite a fun, leisure filled future in store but the interim period is going to be brutal for the average earner.

I'm so glad I'm retired, I feel for those who still need a job.

AI will cause huge problems for disabled and older workers. It will mostly be warehouse or physical work left over and many people I know are just not physically capable. WFH or office jobs at the lower levels are dying out. I'm fucked when I try to get back into the job market. Considering a switch to cleaning or care but I don't know if my body will cope honestly.

My friends regularly shout me down. Indeed I am seen as a Debbie Downer in my circle. They think AI will bring vast new opportunities. I think they are ostriches.

I genuinely feel terrified for my dcs future....in all honesty if I had known what was ahead i wouldn't have had kids.

You are absolutely correct regarding working from home.

If office space is sold and everything is done on Teams then why should an employer pay a decent wage in the UK-and be held to employment law-when he can employ a cheaper person elsewhere in the world to do the same job.

Even better, if much of that work can be done by AI.

It used to be a joke when people would ring up about their gas bill and find themselves talking to someone in South Africa or India but it's not looking so funny now.

There will be a high price to pay for "working at home" I fear.

If you can live with yourself (!), start a company in cleaning or care - never seen a poor boss in those industries. They make a fortune with people on min wage under them.

My partner has worked for maybe five months in the last three years. Previously had no problem getting work, it's a niche field. But it's terrifying, we are moving in the new year because realistically I can't manage the fear of supporting us in an expensive rental on only my income. I feel sick.most of the time.

Where on earth would average unemployed Joe get the cash investment needed to do that?!

That's terrible, I'm so sorry. AI is affecting so many creative industries (including my own, in several ways).

Why is that relevant?

I know many people who WFH are genuinely busy between 9-5 and don’t have time to do anything else in the house expect for on their scheduled breaks, myself included before I left.

But I have known many people who gloat about how they can get so much done WFH. Going on about how great it is they don’t have to pay for childcare, can nip out to do the school run, do the washing. Waking up, logging in and going back to bed. Moaning when a colleague has the audacity to ask them to join a meeting when they are in the middle of a Netflix show. Yes there’s a lot of rage bait about it online but I’ve also had family members, friends etc tell me about how efficient WFH is for them. I think there are a lot of jobs out there that probably aren’t necessarily “needed” for a company to operate but have just found themselves existing within the corporate world. The sort of job where someone sits in meetings all day “consulting” and then when you ask them what they actually do it’s all a load of jargon. These jobs continue perhaps because the person is liked within the company and nobody wants to make them redundant, or because nobody has properly crunched the numbers and realised these staff aren’t needed.

I’m not blaming the people employed in those sort of jobs, if I had a job like that I’d make bloody sure I didn’t leave or say anything too. But I think AI will expose these sort of roles and quickly weed them out. And then suddenly someone who was a “Global Strategy Optimization Executive” or “Performance Optimisation Lead” who spent years in a job answering a few emails every day will suddenly find themselves unemployed and applying for jobs in a care home

Am glad not all entrepreneurs have this attitude.